Reappraisal of Tele-Surgery in the Era of High-Speed, High-Bandwidth, Secure Communications: Evaluation of Surgical Performance in Local/Remote Environments

Communication and video transmission delays negatively affect telerobotic surgery. Since latency varies by communication environment and robot, to realize remote surgery, both must perform well. This study aims to examine the feasibility of telerobotic surgery by validating the communication environment and local/remote robot operation, using secure commercial lines and newly developed robots. Hirosaki University and Mutsu General Hospital, 150 km apart, were connected via Medicaroid's surgical robot. Ten surgeons performed a simple task remotely using information encoding and decoding. The required bandwidth, delay time, task completion time, number of errors, and image quality were evaluated. Next, 11 surgeons performed a complex task using gallbladder and intestinal models in local/remote environments; round trip time (RTT), packet loss, time to completion, operator fatigue, operability, and image were observed locally and remotely. Image quality was not degraded so as to affect remote robot operation. Median RTT was 4 msec (2–12), and added delay was 29 msec. There was no significant difference in accuracy or number of errors for cholecystectomy, intestinal suturing, completion time, surgeon fatigue, or image evaluation. The fact that remote surgery succeeded as well as local surgery showed that this system has the necessary elemental technology for widespread social implementation.